Fisheye Effect
Fisheye effect for photos and video: swell the middle of the frame like a fisheye lens, or pinch it inward, with strength and reach on sliders. Free, no upload.
What is a fisheye lens?
A fisheye is an ultra-wide lens that takes in about 180 degrees, and some take in more. A normal lens keeps straight lines straight, but that gets impossible as the view approaches 180 degrees. A fisheye gives up on it and squeezes the edge of the view so the whole hemisphere fits. Lines that miss the center bow outward, and the middle looks swollen.
The name comes from the physicist Robert W. Wood. His 1906 paper, Fish-eye views, and vision under water, showed a whole-sky photograph taken with a pinhole camera filled with water: the sky as a fish would see it.
How to add a fisheye effect to a photo
The page opens on the Fisheye preset, Amount 1 and Radius 1, which swells the middle of the frame as far as the effect will go.
Amount runs from -1 to 1. Positive values bulge, negative values pinch and 0 leaves the picture alone. Radius sets how much of the frame is affected, up to 1; at 0.5 the oval just touches the middle of each edge. The other presets are Bulge, Pinch and Small, which is a strong bulge kept to the middle.
Settings for a pet portrait, an action-cam look and a pinched tunnel
Fisheye pet or skateboard portrait: the Fisheye preset, with the face or the board in the middle, shot from close up. The nose grows and the background curves away.
Action-cam look: Amount 0.3 and Radius 0.7. A mild swell bows straight lines the way a small wide-angle camera does, without making faces look comic.
Pinched tunnel: Pinch, at Amount -0.6 and Radius 0.5. The middle shrinks away from you and the surroundings pull in toward it.
How does a bulge or pinch work?
The effect works inside an oval around the center of the frame, shaped like the frame itself. Each pixel in there takes its color from a point on the same line from the center, either nearer to it or farther out. Taking it from nearer magnifies the middle, which is a bulge; taking it from farther out shrinks the middle, which is a pinch.
The shift follows a power curve of the distance, so the middle changes most and the rim of the oval not at all. That lets the effect meet the untouched picture without a seam. Liquify Image has a Bloat brush you can put anywhere in the frame.
Why does the fisheye crop my photo and blur its center?
A real fisheye takes in more of the scene, but this effect can only rearrange the pixels you already have. At the Fisheye preset, the middle of each edge shows what used to be halfway out from the center, so the outer part of the picture gets pushed out of the frame. Leave room around the subject, or lower Amount.
At Amount 1 the very middle is magnified so much that a few pixels cover a small disc, and it goes soft. Amount 0.7 keeps it sharper, and starting from a large photo helps. A strong pinch with Radius above 0.5 reaches past the picture's border, which shows up as stretched edge pixels.
Saving a fish eye photo
The classic fish eye photo usually ends up as a round avatar. Save a JPG with the face in the middle, then cut it to a circle with a tool from the Image Tools hub.
On a clip, the swell holds still while the footage moves through it, and MP4 keeps the sound of a skate or a pet video.